This blog will be updated by his family while he is
gone on his mission for two years to Hungary.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

An Amazing Conversion Story

This week was a busy week!

On Tuesday we went up to Budapest for quarterly interviews with the mission president. I feels so crazy that I have already been here for almost six months!! Budapest is always so pretty! Of course, we never see much of it in the bus or subway ride in between the train station and the mission home, but what we do see is amazing.

On Thursday we had Zone training in Miskolc. The zone leaders, Elder Dellenbach and Elder Raymond, talked about learning on teaching and finding with the Spirit. Everyone left with a desire to seek out the Spirit at all times and in all places in order to better help the people of Hungary.

The highlight of the week was having dinner in an apartment where two ladies lived. They were baptised almost 25 years ago, when the church officially came into Hungary and opened up a mission. They fed us paprikás csirke, probably the best I've tasted, and some Hungarian-stlye pudding, served on a graham-cracker stlye crust and topped with strawberries, but the best part was their conversion story. Zsoka and Valéria lived together in the same apartment to save rent money, and they had a strong friendship and a love for the Bible. However, neither of them ever went to any specific church, even though they knew that it would be good to go to church from their study of the scriptures. Valéria said it was kind of like the feelings that Joseph Smith had, not knowing if any of the churches were true. One day Zsoka was in the bélvaros (downtown) doing some shopping. It was raining a little and she was in a little bit of a bad mood. She saw the missionaries across the square with a table set up with fliers and such. She walked briskly to avoid them, and came out a few minutes later with her shopping. By now she had forgotten the missionaries and was thinking about other things, when one of the missionaries stuck out a copy of Selections from the Book of Mormon in front of her and asked her "Ismered ezt a könyvét?" (or "are you familiar with this book?). She said that she wasn't familiar with the book, but then her eye caught the phrase "egy másik tanúbizonyság Jézus Krisztusról" (or "another testament of Jesus Christ) on the cover and said that she was, however, familiar with Jesus Christ. By the end of the conversation she invited the missionaries over to talk more about their message. As Zsoka and Valéria read the Book of Mormon (or the translated selections from it), they said so many of their questions were answered. They said that the missionaries had trouble keeping the lessons focused on the gospel discussions because of all the questions that they had for the missionaries. Eventually they were baptized, and became the first two Hungarian members of the Debrecen branch. Apparently, the mission president was thinking about closing the Debrecen area down, because it had been the only area in Hungary since the mission had been opened that had had no success. After they were baptized, the missionaries were able to find a lot more investigators in Debrecen, and the proselyting area in Debrecen remained open.